


The One You're With

by orphan_account



Category: Canadian 6 Degrees, Last Night (1998), due South
Genre: F/M, Sexual Fantasy, Sexual Surrogate, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-15
Updated: 2012-08-15
Packaged: 2017-11-12 04:47:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/486873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Craig Zwiller helps a woman fulfill her sexual fantasy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The One You're With

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mergatrude](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mergatrude/gifts).



> This is for mergatrude, because when someone organizes and moderates a gift exchange, like the [ C6D Midsummer Santa Gift Exchange 2012](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/c6d_midsummer_2012) , shouldn't she get a surprise gift, too? 
> 
> This story assumes that Thatcher was recalled to Canada to deal with the apocalypse before Ray Kowalski was assigned to the 27th district.

The e-mail is waiting for him when he comes back from foraging in liquor stores with Patrick. He’s not ready to tell Patrick what he’s doing, just how many guests he’s having over and why both he and his guests might need a little alcoholic lubrication. Patrick fumbled around, indirectly asking him if he’s got situational alcoholism; once he realized what Patrick was getting at, he mocked him. “What about the end of the world would make me want to go on a six week bender? And why would it matter if it did?” he asked. Patrick inclined his head slightly: point made. 

Craig shrugged. “Really, it just seems like I might want to have something that’s worth trading for,” he told Patrick, who nodded in understanding. It’s not entirely false, but it’s also not entirely true. Originally, Craig had made sure he had drinks out of social courtesy; he burned through that supply a lot faster than he expected. In retrospect, this makes him think he’s kind of dumb. 

Of course women seeking to fulfill their most intimate fantasies want a little extra help from something notorious for lowering inhibitions. A couple of his partners got a little too drunk a little too fast. The girl who wanted him to wear a mask got as far as the bedroom (he even had the mask on) when he realized she really wasn’t tracking much of anything. He took the mask off, pulled the blankets up to her shoulders and sat in the corner reading a book, checking on her periodically. When she woke up, he gave her aspirin and water and privacy, leaving her alone in his darkened bedroom for a couple of hours to finish sleeping it off.

When she came out, she turned down breakfast and had trouble meeting his eyes. He walked her down to the lobby and waited until her ride came. When her friend’s car showed up, he figured she’d walk out the door without looking back. But just as she was about to leave, as he was already heading for the elevator, she rushed up to him and hugged him. “Thank you,” she said. “What you did…that was better than what I wanted.” She kissed his cheek and ran out to jump in her friend’s car.

That sort of fell into the category Craig thought of as “sad fantasies.” The mask thing was intriguing, but what actually ended up happening was that she got trashed and he took care of her instead of taking advantage. That she ended up getting more out of that than out of her sexual fantasy led Craig to some pretty bleak conclusions about her life, about men. He was glad he’d made her feel good, in the end, but kind of angry with the world that simply treating her like a human being meant so much to her. He didn’t check anything off on his list, but since one basic hypothesis of the whole experiment is “Craig Zwiller can make people feel good” he figures that one fell into the positive proof category.

The e-mail waiting for him after his trip to the liquor store is from an anonymous account (most of them are). There’s no salutation, just:

_I saw your page. I have a fantasy I think you can help me with. You’ll have to wear a uniform, which I will provide. I want you to be a member of the RCMP, standing guard duty (think of the Palace Guards at Buckingham Palace if you’re not familiar with this tradition here in Canada). I am going to touch you, but you must remain absolutely still and silent for as long as you can. ___

Craig’s not sure this one is specifically covered in his extensive list, but the list is organic: constantly growing, rarely pruned. He e-mails back: _Sounds intriguing. Are you a man or a woman? I’m game either way, but I’d like to know in advance. Need to know what I’m getting myself into, you know? ___

He gets a response almost immediately: _she _wants to meet as soon as possible. She can get the uniform easily, using the physical information she already has about him. “If it’s not inconvenient” she’d like him to shave his beard as close as possible. Without thinking too hard about it, Craig writes to her, asking her to come by in twenty-four hours, promising that the shave will be close and recent. A brief e-mail confirms the date, and Craig turns off the computer and starts getting ready for his next adventure, an acrobat who wants to tie him up.__

The next day, the woman comes by with a garment bag. She’s shorter than Craig, but not by a lot. She’s slender, dark hair and eyes, pale skin, yellow power suit over a cream silk blouse, the kind that doesn’t have buttons but is pretty far away from being a t-shirt. She hands him the garment bag. 

“There are instructions in the bag,” she tells him before he can even offer her a drink.

“Would you like a drink?” he asks even though she’s obviously impatient for him to get down to business. “I’ve got drinks.” 

“Ginger ale, please,” she says. Craig indicates that she should sit down, and he gets one for each of them. He returns from the kitchen to find that she’s still standing in the middle of his living room. While he was gone, she’d draped the garment bag over the back of a chair, but if not for that, he would’ve sworn she never moved.

“Please, sit down,” he says, sitting on one end of the couch, still holding their drinks. Forcing her to come to him. She does, taking her drink and sitting at the far end of the couch. He raises his glass. “Fondest wishes,” he says in toast. She snorts, but raises her glass back at him before taking a sip.

“It’s just….” This is always the awkward part. Craig has yet to find a partner who wants to talk exactly as much as he does. Some clam up, some go on and on. In the face of the former, Craig babbles nervously. When confronted by the latter, he tries to be responsive, but not so much so that they end up spending all their time together talking rather than doing.

She looks at him curiously, takes another sip.

“I’d like to know a little about you. About what you want,” Craig finally says. That should be neutral. He’s opened the door for her to tell him about herself, but also giving her an out if she only wants to talk about her fantasy.

She thinks about it, looking at him, her gaze assessing but falling just short of calculating. “It’s pretty straightforward,” she finally says, shrugging a little. “I want you to put on the uniform,” she nods her head toward the garment bag, “and stand as if on guard duty, perfectly still, while I…explore you.”

“Right,” he says. “In your e-mail, you said I should be as still as I could be for as long as I could be,” he prompts.

The ice rattling slightly in her glass is the only tell that she’s not completely calm and collected. “It’s a…. I want you to have perfect self-control until you can’t anymore,” she says, blushing a little, looking away from him. Even though she can’t see him, Craig nods gently.

“How much control do I lose?” he asks carefully. That brings her gaze back to him. He keeps eye contact. This is important. If this is a fantasy about lack of consent and loss of control, he’s not sure if he can go through with it. He’s got “coercive sex” on the list, but he hasn’t really thought that one all the way through. Certainly not enough to play with it today.

“You know that I want you,” she says carefully. “You know that you want me, but duty stands between us. But, at some point, desire outweighs duty.”

Craig nods again; he can work with this. He sets his drink down and stands up. “I’ll just go get changed, then,” he says. “You pick a spot for me to guard.” She laughs a little, and he picks up the garment bag and goes into his bedroom.

He knows, from women he dated…before…what theatrical costumes usually smell like, and while this does have a whiff of warehouse to it, it’s not the _same _kind of warehouse. And putting it on is a complicated business, much more complicated than a stage costume would be. This really is an RCMP dress uniform, and he’s grateful that she thought to include detailed instructions.__

Eventually, Craig figures out the fasteners and the straps and everything. He puts the hat on and does not look in the mirror. If he did anything wrong, he wouldn’t know it, and she’ll tell him anyway.

When he comes back to her, she’s staring out at the city, drink in her hand. He stands next to her, waiting. She turns and looks him up and down, adjusting the lanyard slightly.

“The voice,” she says thoughtfully.

“What about my voice?” Craig’s not getting defensive, he just needs to know what to do, how he can help her with her fantasy. She looks at him, though, really looks at him and for a moment loses her distracted air.

“Your voice is fine,” she says crisply. “Quite pleasant, really. But….”

“Gotchya,” Craig says. His voice isn’t _his _voice, the voice of the man she wants him to be. Because by now Craig’s realized that she had a very specific Mountie in mind. “If I really was on guard duty, though, I’d mostly be not talking anyway, right?”__

She nods, and Craig finishes his thought, “And even if I were so overcome that I just had to say something,” he continues, throwing the thought out so she can accept it or reject it.

“…you wouldn’t say it very loudly,” she concludes, looking pleased with the solution they’ve come up with. Craig nods, not saying anything at all. She looks at him and the room, then says, “Just stay here by the window, looking out. But back up a little.” He stands back from the window, giving her about three feet of clearance.

Back when he’d been bumming around, the idea of a high-rise mid-century modern apartment had been appealing, but he’d loved the view most of all. He’d tricked it out with period furniture, gotten one of the theatre studies girls he’d dated to advise him on décor. He’d never dreamed, then, that he’d spend his last weeks actually using it like a bachelor pad from a sixties farce.

He stands at attention (or maybe it’s parade rest? He’s not sure; he just let her arrange him to her heart’s content) and stares out the wall of sliding glass between his living room and his balcony. He hasn’t really thought about it much, but simply standing here, waiting for her to make her move, he really has nothing else to concentrate on but his view of the city. The view he’d always loved: the dawn, the day, the twilight, the city lights. But now it’s just this flat, featureless light. He hates his view, lately.

She circles him, _examining _him, and seems to have satisfied herself that he’s what she wants him to be. She’s moving closer, but tentatively, like she expects him to shy away from her. But that’s not his role in her little drama. She told him to stay still and he will.__

Because while he’s got his own huge list of fantasies, his online profile made it clear that he was open to suggestion. He knows he’ll never cross everything off his list in the time allotted, so there’s no reason to limit himself. Just because he chose to be organized about getting as much done while he still could doesn’t mean everyone else was as methodical. And the point of the list wasn’t just that he wanted to nail Madame Carlton, or suck Patrick Wheeler’s dick, or fuck a pregnant woman. 

The main point of his list was that he wanted to connect. And since he knows his own limitations, he knows he wouldn’t, probably _couldn’t _connect emotionally before his deadline, he’s instead trying to connect with women’s fantasies, his own fantasies. And sometimes the e-mails and phone calls he gets surprise him. But he’s making it a policy not to turn anyone away unless he’s actively repulsed by what they want.__

For Craig, the whole exercise is about discovery. Discovering if reality can live up to fantasy. Discovering if a guy who wants to fuck a chubby girl doggy-style has anything in common with a hefty woman who’ll let a scrawny bastard like him plow her from behind (it turned out they didn’t have anything to say to each other that wasn’t about sex; she barely spoke English and he spoke no Russian, but he felt like they understood each other just the same and he’d had an almost painfully powerful orgasm while he pushed into her and she pushed back onto him).

He’s discovering new fantasies all the time, and his partners are their own kind of revelation. They aren’t blow-up dolls, they aren’t constructs of his own imagination. They have thoughts and feelings and needs of their own. And this woman, particularly, seems to know exactly what she wants and isn’t shy about revealing it to him.

And it’s that revelation he welcomes from all the women who’ve passed through his door, and who will pass through his door. When the first terrible news reports came in, when the media were running stories about everything related to the end of the world, and everyone was watching every single report, he’d learned that “apocalypse” literally meant "uncovering" or “unveiling.” Well, that’s what he and his partners are doing: uncovering and unveiling each other. Literally and metaphorically.

She’s getting bolder. She’s sniffing at him, but since all he can smell on himself is warehouse and an undertone of his soap and deodorant, he’s not surprised when she draws back. He can almost imagine her expression: disappointment and distaste. He’s seen that plenty of times in the last few weeks; women who suddenly realize that the fantasy only works for them if it remains unrealized. And that ends the encounter, and all he ends up doing in those situations is make sure they have a safe way to get home. 

But she’s determined. In his peripheral vision, he sees her wrinkle her nose, then her shake her body slightly and can almost imagine her thought processes: _Okay, the scent is wrong, so I’ll shut that out and concentrate on what’s right. _He gets the feeling that she hates compromise, but not so much that she’s willing to walk away from him. From this.__

She starts touching him. Or, Craig suspects, touching the capitalized Uniform. Her hands roam all over the front of the tunic, then lower to alternately bunch and smooth the extra fabric on the pants. It feels good even if he’s incidental as far as she’s concerned. He’s starting to get aroused by this, by keeping himself still while she explores him. Normally, he’s in constant motion; it’s unnatural to be in bondage to her. Unnatural but exciting.

He wonders if she’s in the RCMP herself. She got the uniform organized quickly enough, and she has an authoritative manner to her. He wonders what it would be like to be surrounded by attractive, fit Mounties all the time, wearing their bright red dress uniforms. In his mind, they’re (mostly) women, but he can imagine all of the looking-without-touching he’d have to do. Especially if these imaginary Mounties were pledged to remain completely still while he walked past them. 

She’s rubbing her chest against his back. He mostly feels some pressure, and the friction of the tunic as it moves with her. He wonders about the Mountie she wants but can’t have. Colleague? Married? Subordinate? As soon as he thinks that, his hands quiver a little. He lets his fingers curl into subtle fists. The thought that he’s subordinate to her does very good things for him, makes him harder. 

She moans behind him; he wonders if she saw or felt him clench his hands, if his starting to lose control is feeding into her fantasy. He guesses it must be, since she’s moved to his side now, standing on her toes to rub her pubis against his holster, where the gun would go if she’d given him one. As he stares straight ahead, he can feel her hike up her skirt. She parts her knees and reaches her arm across his chest to his shoulder, telegraphing what she wants to do next so he can be ready. He moves his arm, the one closest to her, back slightly to let her know he’s ready.

She jumps up, straddling his hip, and he catches her around her waist, one armed. It’s awkward and difficult, but she’s moaning steadily now, nearly growling as she pants in his ear. She might even be coming; it’s hard to tell. Craig lasts as long as he can, but it’s not long before he has to shift her so that she’s in front of him and he can bring up his other arm to help support her.

She doesn’t seem to mind at all. She even reaches down, going under the tunic to palm his erection, moving her arm and hand as much as she can. He’s got his hands under her ass now, and she’s rising and falling slightly, as if they weren’t fully clothed, as if he really was inside her.

She lets her head fall back, and he licks and nips at the smooth skin of her throat. She growls again, says something that’s probably someone’s name, and he pushes against her hand and comes, his body trembling as his orgasm hits him and from the strain of keeping her from falling. Her breath is starting to quiet, to become more even.

“Let me down,” she whispers, and he stoops and moves his arms so she can get her feet under her. He’s not sure what he’s supposed to do. He would really, really like to sink to the floor right about now, but instead he locks his knees, lets his hands return to his sides, and once again stares out his window, trying not to see anything at all.

Now that she’s done, gotten…something from him (he hopes it was what she wanted), she shifts her clothes back into place. They’re pretty minute adjustments, but when she picks up her suit jacket and puts it on, Craig figures it means they’re done. He relaxes a little and reaches up to the collar so he can peel off the tunic, but she holds up her hand. “Just….” Her voice trails off, her eyes slide off to the side, away from him and toward the bright flat nothing light outside his windows. She composes herself. “Just keep the uniform,” she tells him briskly, and literally spins on her heel, letting herself out of his apartment before he can even think of moving to escort her.

She’s gone, and Craig’s not quite sure what to do with himself. It just adds to his nervous energy, knowing that he caught glimpses of profound longing and maybe even despair from her. Not too surprising…it’s the end of the world and nobody feels fine. But he feels like she would’ve held onto the fantasy that led her to him for years or even decades if she’d had that kind of time. 

Maybe this Mountie she wanted…maybe she cares about him. Maybe she loves him, but can’t tell him because he’s her subordinate or she’s just plain scared of being known like that. Maybe she can’t tell him she loves him because she knows he doesn’t love her. Maybe he loves someone else. 

He pulls the tunic off and considers raiding his drinks supply, but decides not to. Some fantasies had turned out to be so disturbing to enact that he’d sought oblivion in alcohol, but her fantasy wasn’t disturbing. Just kind of…sad. In the same way everything is sad these days, if he lets himself think about it

Craig shakes off the feeling. She’d shown him parts of herself that no one else got to see, and that revelation is a huge part of what his list is about. He wanders into his kitchen to get some water and to look at his list to try to decide what he’s going to cross off after this encounter.

Objectification (me). Check. Uniform (me). Check. Self-restraint (me). Check. Sexual surrogate (me for someone else). Check. He hesitates, then finds a blank spot on the inside of the door to the cabinet under the kitchen sink and writes in “Unrequited love” and then checks it off. He pretends not to notice that the space he just filled in happened to be right between Patrick Wheeler’s name and Sexual Surrogate (someone else for ----?).

And he thinks that maybe he will have that drink after all.


End file.
